None of this is to say that Putin really wants a return to the way things were -- if only because he is surely smart enough to know that such a return is impossible. He understands the need for at least civil relations with the West, even as he seeks to renew ties with old Soviet allies. He dutifully pays lip service to civil liberties, hailing a free press as "the most important guarantor of the irreversibility of our country's democratic course" in a meeting with journalists. He even reminded his former KGB colleagues at a banquet last year that their new task was to protect the constitutional rights of Russia's citizens.
When it comes to economic reform, moreover, Putin the authoritarian may deserve better grades than Yeltsin the democrat. Under Putin's administration, taxes have been cut and the tax code simplified. After a decade of foot-dragging, it looks like private ownership of land may at last be legalized.
Yet while socialism is not the part of the Soviet legacy that Putin and his supporters seek to reclaim, a powerful state most certainly is. In Moscow Times last March, Russian commentator Evgenia Albats wrote that Putin's ideology is "one of extreme statism pragmatically married to a market economy." The word for that is fascism. And under a statist regime in which the rights and freedoms of the individual are viewed as secondary, the market economy will always remain, to some extent, at the whim of whoever happens to be in charge of the state.
When Russia embarked on its course of political change, some observers argued that it would have done better to take the same road as China, emphasizing market-oriented economic reform first in the hope that civil liberties, ideological openness, and freedom of expression would come later.
Nowadays, with new reports of brutal crackdowns on political dissidents or followers of an innocuous meditation-and-exercise movement trickling in from China nearly every day, the Chinese way looks less and less like a positive model. Russia's problem is not that it started with political change, but that it didn't take the changes far enough.
Indeed, perhaps the real message of the current events in Russia is that moral issues take precedence over economic ones after all. Those among the Russian democrats who said that the most important task facing the country was an honest accounting and repentance for the crimes of communism may have been right. If this task had been tackled, Russia could not have ended up with an ostensibly "democratic" government that sees itself as an almost-proud heir to the Soviet state.
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